Dark Zen
by iridescentZEN
Summary: Maybe, just maybe, he was searching for some enlightenment, a dark zen. Vampire Willow & Riley Finn.


Dark Zen

Author: iridescentZEN

Disclaimers: The characters are not mine.

VampireWillow/Riley Finn Alternate Universe Angst Fic.

* * *

There is a little bit of Heaven in her world and it's him. She is an accursed thing and he burns her through and through. Not the wicked sting of a crucifix or the agony of a splash of holy water. He's a different kind of burn. A different kind of hurt.

He is a beautiful man who she feeds off of more than four times a week. Not a friend, but a customer. She sits on his lap and grinds against him, hungry in more ways than one, but she doesn't always like the way he touches her. The way his fingertips ghost across her lips, one sweet digit parting them to reveal her fangs, digging the point of one into his soft flesh until the blood wells up for her to lap at with her tongue. Never sure of why, she always thinks of herself as a poisonous snake being milked for venom when he does that, even if it's him who's giving up the poison.

Those same gentle fingertips often form a ring around her upper arm or curl into her hair when she feeds off of him, when she takes his essence into her mouth like she'll take his cock later and he'll enjoy it just as much or maybe less. She can never tell with him.

Often he's in military fatigues, and on the rare occasion he's in civilian clothes, like he's someone she shouldn't be afraid of. Like he's not part of the big organization that has every demon watching its back. When he looks at her, she wonders what he sees, but doesn't want to ask in case she gets an answer she's not happy with.

At first, she would feed and he would get off, and then she would get him off some more, because she was so very hungry and he made her feel full, made her feel pleased and she didn't have to hurt him in that way that she used to enjoy but finds so empty now. He would stare at her, beautiful blue eyes, so alive and so warm, but on her, studying and inspecting as though he would find her infested with cockroaches or maggots. Or maybe, just maybe he was searching for some enlightenment, a dark zen. Only demons don't have a yin and yang, a light and a dark. For most it's just the dark, but she knows she has a gray area.

Once she made the mistake of asking, "What?" because he was staring at her.

He replied, "Nothing. Just thinking about what you'd look like in a cage."

"We could do that. If you want," she replied sullenly, and tried not to be too offended when he looked disgusted with her. She didn't know why. Wouldn't it be okay if they were only playing?

They have only joined their bodies once. Willow imagined her body to be about as inhabitable to a human as a nuclear testing site. Afraid that when he was within that she was giving him cancer, making him as sterile and as dead as she was, but his warmth spread as quickly as her legs, and soon it hadn't mattered. / Playing house next to plastic people with bio-hazard decals on their head. Everything fake. Everything still. Not real people awaiting very real destruction. Consequences being monitored to see what the results would be to those that breathe, those that feel./

While alive, she had never experienced anything like it. As a vampire, it had always been brutal, filled with pain, and that was the pleasure. Like a meal it simply wasn't any fun if there wasn't any screaming. Only she found that there was fun to be had with slow moving fingertips and kisses that lasted a small eternity and were never diluted with the taste of blood. Where she wore the face of Willow, the lie. She remembers walking everywhere, hand entwined firmly with Xander's, and she tries not to think of what it would feel like to walk someplace with this soldier boy, his warm fingers twined with her own cold ones, telling the world that she was his and he was hers. That maybe they had something more than a transaction.

She wonders if he imagines her in clothes not made of leather or velvet, her hair glinting with rays of sunshine. If he can see her like a living girl, all full of original blood, heart beating and kidneys flushing, so very warm and 98.6 degrees or if she is just a plastic dummy with a warning decal on her head.

Does he think about the torment that the soul went through before she died?

Willow will never ask him. It's better to just feed from him, long drawn out bites, so that he can grasp the back of her head in a way that is all wrong for the act that's taking place. It's just not right that he's so empty inside and alive that this is the only thing that brings him pleasure.

It would be nice to see him, blonde hair, the poster boy for Americana once upon a time when it wasn't ruled by everyone dark and deadly, his face lit up in daylight. To see a genuine smile across his face, instead of the grimace she gets when she wipes his blood from the corner of her mouth.

Once, he held her close and asked in a soft whisper, "Who did this to you?"

She only smiled, eyes wide and curious, and questioned, "Who did this to you?"

Plastic people. Not real. Maybe he's as fake to himself as she is to him. Does he sit there, arm bleeding in the crook, a twenty dollar bill twisted between curled white knuckled fingers, waiting for his destruction?

End


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